1st International Open Data Dialog

Potentials for urban innovation and new businesses

Open Data is one of the most important keys to the future of our knowledge-based society. Be it environmental data, public utility data, geo data, or some other data – the open data approach offers great potential for innovation in the 21st century.

Open data is hardly a new concept, its origins being easily traced to open science data, a fairly common practice among scientists. Its translation to governmental data is credited to Edd Dumbill in the 2005 XTech conference, acknowledged by the OECD, and supported by Tim Bray and Tim O’Reilly in 2006. Actors in the modern society will have to decide to what extent they want to share information with third parties, such as application developers or commercial companies, without losing a competitive advantage, or worse, violating the privacy of its users.

No one will be able to take this step on their own. Administrations, economies, and societies will have to join their forces fully unfold the potential of data. For example, the availability of infrastructure data, environmental data, and demographic data would enable citizens, NGOs, or companies to combine these to produce a family friendly map. Furthermore, public agencies would improve the quality of their data by publishing their data and offering third parties the opportunity to point out errors or gaps.

The provision of open data will make processes and their underlying information and communication systems more understandable and strengthen the trust between industry, governments and civil societies. With the Internet of Things, the mounds of data will continue to grow. It is for these reasons that we should manage them – competently, conceptually, and jointly.

The Open Data Dialog seeks to target the industry, civil society, government and research to discuss the status, needs and challenges in opening data to the public. We will review and discuss new business cases and businesses being established on open data as well as review and discuss organizational, legal and regulatory settings for open data.